I am a traveler. I enjoy navigating foreign terrain. And I am typically a serial monogamous, years of long-term relationship after long-term relationship with desert in between. Due to this, the rules of this type of playground are very foreign to me.

It was a cold, busy weekday evening. My day was filled with people, emails, numbers, lunch, coffees, long queues, lifts and public transport. I made my way across London after work, fighting the rush hour crowd - ironically on my way to a beginner's meditation class.

We can look at some of the poorest poverty-stricken families in the world, yet they seem to find joy and happiness in their daily lives. Happiness doesn't come from outside of ourselves it comes from within. It's a mindset shift. It's a decision that no matter what is going on around us, you choose to look for happiness.

When I first signed up to do a yoga teacher training on an ashram nestled in the Himalayas, I never anticipated the challenge. I'd never done anything like this before and it was truly transformational.

If the loneliness stems from being over plugged-in to the digital world - then how about reducing the time you spend online. Put those digital devices aside. Come on. Not forever. Simply, unplug now and then.

It may not feel like meditation when we plop down and try to sit cross-legged on a pillow in the middle of a hard wood floor. We end up meditating on the amazing, migratory pattern of pain as it moves from our hips to our knees and back to our hips again.

'It doesn't matter where or how far you go... the important thing is how alive you are,' said Thoreau. After 25 years of travel writing it is something I am only just beginning to appreciate. More and more I feel what is relevant is not where I travel to, but how I travel.

The passionate chefs, in the open kitchen (whom you will meet if you take a cooking class) are masters in - yep you guessed it... fusing flavours of Asia. Try rice paper noodle rolls, fresh seafood platters, grilled snapper and handmade noodles.

There's a 35 year-old PR girl who's never orgasmed with a man; an 18 year-old from Greece who wanted to "be like James Bond"; a woman in her 60s who wanted to explore a side of herself that she'd neglected since motherhood.

In my 20s, I'd tried endless self-help books in an effort to become someone else. I hated that I always felt anxious and lacking confidence. I was determined to rid myself of these defects so that I could finally be happy.

Decide not to fume and vent against the world, the window cleaner, your boss or the kids. Just be. Be still. Allow life to arise around you, and if you invest yourself in anything, let it only be things that bring love to the surface of your heart and soul.

The soul is not going to be expressed fully and naturally. It will have to please the world in order to be loved. We all create an ego that is this personality that wants to match the world and we start adopting a lot of judgement from our surroundings.

I am not talking here about the need to impose this sort of spiritualism on the world. I am suggesting the process has already begun, the genie is out of the bottle. Like Marxism, our economic system has set up an unstoppable dialectic, just not a material one.